[Mono-dev] Building Mono on Windows - And Having a Windows Installer again

Sun Nov 30 14:09:23 UTC 2014

Hey Alex,

Jo Shields is currently working on revamping the Windows Installer in his repo: https://github.com/directhex/newbuilder
I contributed the WiX setup files for creating an MSI installer. Jo sent me this link for a preview build (the usual caveats apply): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz6-k9ELOQf3YTE1RHV3Y0dNaFU/view

Btw. while developing the WiX setup I used the binaries from your AppVeyor build, it all worked fine :)

Can you maybe also make changes to http://www.mono-project.com/docs/compiling-mono/windows/ (just click the "edit page on github" link), so it reflects what is necessary right now to build Mono on Windows? I think that page is pretty outdated right now.

-- Alex

> Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 14:29:29 +0100
> From: ajlennon at dynamicdevices.co.uk
> To: monodanmorg at yahoo.com
> CC: mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
> Subject: Re: [Mono-dev] Building Mono on Windows - And Having a Windows	Installer again
> 
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> On 30/11/2014 02:13, Edward Ned Harvey (mono) wrote:
> >> From: mono-devel-list-bounces at lists.ximian.com [mailto:mono-devel-list-
> >> bounces at lists.ximian.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Morgan
> >>
> >> I see the latest version of Mono's Windows installer is 3.2.3.  Can this be used
> >> to build the latest from git?
> >>
> >> I see a link for binaries for 3.4.0, but they are not official binaries.
> >>
> >> I am going to try build Mono on Windows using Cygwin.  Not sure how web
> >> the visual studio stuff works.
> > Search this list for Appveyor.  I know Alex Lennon was putting some effort in, and I think got to the point of having a reliable automated build process - but check with folks to be sure (I haven't followed very closely and I could be wrong).  At some point, Miguel pulled Duncan Mak into the conversation, so I would guess maybe Duncan is involved with distributing windows builds...  All of this occurred within the last ~ 1 month or so.
> >
> 
> As Edward says, I did put a bit of time into this and we do have what I
> think is a reliable automated build process on the Windows platform,
> although as ever there are improvements that can be made,
> 
> Stepping back for a second there's a couple of documents that I've been
> maintaining on building Mono under Windows with Cygwin (prior to being
> introduced to Appveyor CI)
> 
> This covers 3.4.0 - 3.6.0,
> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/769292/How-to-build-Mono-on-Windows
> 
> And this covers 3.8.0+
> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/769292/How-to-build-Mono-on-Windows
> 
> It gets you to the point you can just about use Mono but there are some
> remaining issues I have yet to address,
> 
> e.g.
> 
> - understanding how the Mono installer works
> - dealing with hard coded library references in the build (I think the
> installer may do some of this)
> - ensuring that Windows batch files for e.g. mcs, mono, xbuild are
> correcly created (Again I think the installer may do some of this)
> 
> ...
> 
> Further to that I then created a build script for the Appveyor build
> platform, based on work and suggestions from Mladen Mihajlovic, which is
> currently automatically building Mono on commits to the repo
> 
> You can see the build history here:
> https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ajlennon/mono-817
> 
> The output "artifact" from any of these builds is currently a set of
> Mono binaries which you _should_ be able to download and use straight
> away (would love some feedback on any issues here)
> 
> e.g. https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ajlennon/mono-817/build/artifacts
> 
> You should also be able to take the script I created and use this to
> build your own build of Mono, independently of the instruction documents
> I reference above. In particular there's a useful line there that
> automates installation of needed Cygwin packages.
> 
> See here: https://github.com/mono/mono/blob/master/appveyor.yml
> (build_script section)
> 
> What I'd like to do next is to modify this script to take the bones of
> the Windows installer and generate an output artifact which was an MSI
> installer.
> 
> Unfortunately this is not trivial (to me at least!), and also requires
> pulling in some GTK# dependencies and so forth. I want to progress this
> but have not yet had time due to work commitments.
> 
> Also, and perhaps more importantly the Cygwin build may all become
> somewhat deprecated as Jo Shields appears to be doing some excellent
> work to make Mono build under MSVC.
> 
> Once this is achievable, to my mind it will be a vastly superior way to
> build Mono, instead of the 2 hour+ Cygwin build with all the faff.
> 
> >> Also, what is the best Linux distro to build mono?  OpenSUSE?  Debian,
> >> Ubuntu?  It has been awhile for me.  Not starting a flame war here - just
> >> wanting the easiest route to get the dependencies on linux  in order to build
> >> the latest mono from git.
> > On basically any system I've seen so far, building is easy.  The basic process of "./configure && make && make install" usually works.  If it doesn't, then add "make get-monolite-latest" before "make EXTERNAL_MCS=..."  as below...
> >
> > On every redhat-based or debian-based (or even mac) system I've ever used, one of these two variants has always worked.
> >
> > OSX
> > export BUILDDIR=/Users/whatever/Projects/mono-build
> > export NUMPROC=3 ; time ( test -d $BUILDDIR && rm -rf $BUILDDIR ; mkdir -p $BUILDDIR ; ./autogen.sh --prefix=$BUILDDIR --disable-bcl-opt --enable-nls=no && make -j $NUMPROC && make install && echo "" && echo "    Done" && echo "")
> >
> > Ubuntu 14.04
> > export BUILDDIR=/home/whatever/Projects/mono-build
> > export NUMPROC=3 ; time ( test -d $BUILDDIR && rm -rf $BUILDDIR ; mkdir -p $BUILDDIR ; ./autogen.sh --prefix=$BUILDDIR --disable-bcl-opt --enable-nls=no && make get-monolite-latest && make -j $NUMPROC EXTERNAL_MCS="${PWD}/mcs/class/lib/monolite/gmcs.exe" && make install && echo "" && echo "    Done" && echo "")
> >
> 
> Possibly a bit off-topic but fwiw I maintain and use Yocto for Embedded
> Linux with meta-mono layer. The recipes for building Mono are here,
> 
> http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/meta-mono/tree/recipes-mono/mono?h=master
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alex
> _______________________________________________
> Mono-devel-list mailing list
> Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/attachments/20141130/93cf4422/attachment.html>